The Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380-1589

The English literary canon is haunted by the figure of the lost woman writer. In our own age, she has been a powerful stimulus for the rediscovery of works written by women. But as Jennifer Summit argues, "the lost woman writer" also served as an evocative symbol during the very formation of an English literary tradition from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries.Lost Property traces the representation of women writers from Margery Kempe and Christine de Pizan to Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots, exploring how the woman writer became a focal point for emerging theories of literature and authorship in English precisely because of her perceived alienation from tradition. Through original archival research and readings of key literary texts, Summit writes a new history of the woman writer that reflects the impact of such developments as the introduction of printing, the Reformation, and the rise of the English court as a literary center.A major rethinking of the place of women writers in the histories of books, authorship, and canon-formation, Lost Property demonstrates that, rather than being an unimaginable anomaly, the idea of the woman writer played a key role in the invention of English literature.

List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroductionThe Early Woman Writer and the Uses of Loss1 Following Corinne: Chaucer's Classical Women Writers"Evir wemenis frend"Dido's Poetics of AbsenceFollowing Corinne: Anelida and the "Lost" Woman WriterRefiguring Criseyde2 The City of Ladies in the Library of Gentlemen: Christine de Pizan in England, 1450-1526Lost in TranslationThe Learned Knight and the Fiction of "Dame Christine"From "Aucteresse" to Auctor: The Morale Proverbes of Caxton and PynsonThe City of Ladies in the Library of Gentlemen3 The Reformation of the Woman WriterEnglish Literary History and the Pious WomanThe Fifteen Oes and the Reformation of DevotionMargery Kempe as "Devout Anchoress": Henry Pepwell's Edition of 1521John Bale's Protestant Bibliography and the Lost History of WomenBentley's Monument of Matrones (1582) and the Recovery of Women's Prayer4 "A Ladies Penne": Elizabeth I and the Art of English Poetry"With Lady Sapphoes Pen""The Arte of a Ladies Penne"The Poetics of QueenshipThe Covert Place of Women's Writing"Chère Soeur": The Queen of England and the Queen of ScotsAfterwordLiterary History without WomenIndex

Modern Language Association: MLA Prize for a First Book
Honorable Mention

Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarshi: Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship First Book Prize
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